RIDICULE (52)

Directed by: Patrice Leconte

Starring: Charles Berling, Fanny Ardant, Jean Rochefort

The Pitch: In 18th-century Versailles an impoverished young nobleman finds that social standing, and access to the King, depends exclusively on the ability to make witty remarks.

Theo Sez: Unusual subject-matter more or less carries this rather bland movie, even if (as illustrated by, e.g. the "twenty insults" sequence in ROXANNE) it's almost impossible to make one-liners and bon mots work in movies without linking them either to the narrative or to a comic's specific persona. The various witticisms here (not particularly witty to begin with), deprived of such connection, seem curiously superfluous to the film itself, hanging in the air like a stale smell. What's fascinating is presumably what attracted everyone to the project in the first place, the desperation behind the jokes and the bizarre milieu that allows wit the power of life and death - because wit, as the film is sharp enough to point out, is inextricably linked in this pre-Revolutionary France with upholding the status quo, belonging to a noble line, and keeping at bay the dangerous, no-absolute-Truth ideas of the Enlightenment and the philosophes ("wit is knowing your place", as someone puts it). The film is quietly chilling whenever it suggests the full extent of corruption in this rotten system, when it shows the skull beneath the fragrant skin, yet there's something dull about its indignation - it's a little too primly shocked at these callous noblemen and their topsy-turvy amorality. Had it fully entered their world it might have become as weird and dangerously seductive as Leconte's greatest achievement, THE HAIRDRESSER'S HUSBAND. Instead, it's reasonably intelligent middlebrow entertainment.